Lured by a first prize of £1,000, my greed got the better of an honest evaluation of my talents and for the second year I entered the Basil Bunting Poetry award, this year judged by Jo Shapcott. The results are now up on their website and I've been up and down the shortlist seven times but still can't find my name.
Leo Madigan The Lads I Went to School With
James O'Brien Octogram
Patrick Daly Shade
Nichola Deane I Tell Her Everything I Know About Raisins
Elisabeth Murawski Cleopatra to the Bard, Concerning Julius Caesar
Polly Atkin the bird that makes you afraid
Carol Moldaw A Leafs Gravity
Fiona Ritchie Walker The Second Week of the Soap
Justin McCarthy Baguettes
Mark Cooper Recital
Judy Brown Two Virgins
Margaret Speak The Pyrotechnist Attendant
Jane Routh Step Theory
Malcom Watson Readers Browsing
Ryan Whatley He had his Father’s Fishing License
Geraldine Paine The Creek
Sam Jackson The Keeper of the Keys
David Underdown Bird Man
Moira Lake Girasole
Paul Groves How I became an Existentialist
Congratulations to Justin McCarthy for flying the flag for Ireland. He was a finalist in this year's Golden Pen award.
A possible tip for anyone entering future contests judged by Ms. Shapcott - twenty poems and scarcely an internal rhyme among the twenty, let alone an end rhyme. Sometimes this feels a long and lonely road...
Keep going Peter, the road may be long...but its not lonely!
ReplyDeleteI fell for the same thing with my local library, Shunned by "The Dorothy Shoemaker Award" on two occasions. We won't get fooled again!
ReplyDeleteKat
I looked again for you, but still couldn't find it. Pants!
ReplyDeleteThere's quite a few Irish-y names there...although if I took a pseudonym, I may have to plump for Underdown, such a snuggly name
ReplyDelete